[ghaff]

I agree with all that. But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

I don't see the same sort of pushback for people who do side-projects as a hobby.

[diggan]

> I agree with all that. But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

This is the same in every space/community/hobby I've ever participated in. The people who don't live and breathe $SUBJECT 24/7 are often passed off as "posers" and only doing it for the money, in everything from software engineering, finance, gardening, music making, game development or whatever.

Eventually, we grow up and realize everyone needs food on the table, and everyone isn't chasing combining their passion with their career, and sometimes just do their career to earn enough so they can continue with their passions.

[ghaff]

Music making? Probably. If I'm a landscaper, I'm not sure I need to have a garden at home. Finance? Other than managing my personal finances, I'm not sure I'd have any reason to be an active bond trader in my spare time even if that's what I did all day.

Hopefully you like your day job well enough but lots of very competent people shut it off when they go home.

[diggan]

> If I'm a landscaper, I'm not sure I need to have a garden at home.

There are more professions around gardening than specifically landscaping :) And yes, they have communities and hard-core fans who read books, engage with community members and spend basically 24/7 thinking about plants and what not.

Same with finance. You've never met any finance-bros who just can't stop talking about finance every time you look their way?

> Hopefully you like your day job well enough but lots of very competent people shut it off when they go home.

Absolutely, I wasn't trying to say if you don't do that, you suck at your day-job. I'm just trying to get across that this pushback you see sometimes in the software industry about people just doing it as a job instead of a passion are "worse" somehow, happens in every industry I know of. It's in no way exclusive to software developers.

[datavirtue]

I'm so bored with software, be careful not to bring up finance around me.

[htrp]

> in everything from software engineering, finance, gardening, music making, game development or whatever.

In finance, the A tier people don't have work/life balance. It's expected for them to demand effective 24/7 availability (and they get paid accordingly)

[hello_moto]

Likewise in Software. Those A-Tier paygrade is expected to be on-call (24/7 through weekend) no-bonus, lead big projects, review codebases, teach juniors...

[ghaff]

Or exec salaries tend to come with a lot of baggage. Yes, some do fairly disconnected personal travel. But there tend to be pretty long hours and a lot of business travel that I've seen.

[ghaff]

Yes, but that's different from having finance as a hobby.

[aprilthird2021]

It's one of the few highly paid fields where you can do it for fun. You cannot really practice medicine or law in your free time on whatever you want. You can only really do charity work in your free time. Not medical or legal research or anything like what OSS / personal projects are for us.

For other types of engineering, I think there is a bit of a thread of doing it for fun. The Homebrew Robotics Club comes to mind. The easier it is to actually create something in your field, the more there will be a thread of doing it because you love it.

[rafaelmn]

>But software development also often seems to have a strong thread that if you don't also do this for fun, you're not really A material--in a way that really doesn't apply to other engineering disciplines.

Software scales differently, that's why software companies that benefit from that scaling pay so much for top talent.

I can't think of an area where being hyperfocused on your discipline isn't viewed as a a given to get to the top. It's just that most engineering positions that I know of don't care if you're the best to do X, and are more "can you do X". Equivalent to enterprise 9-5.

[HEmanZ]

I only encountered this attitude during college, when doing smart extra work outside of class or internships definitely put you ahead.

In the real world, I literally can’t name a single Senior+ engineer (at the FAANG+ companies I’ve worked at) who codes for fun outside of work. Plenty of them have other constructive and interesting hobbies, but not coding.

Put another way, your hobby app that got 15 downloads doesn’t matter at all if your day job regularly has you shipping code to millions (or especially if it’s billions) of users.